Steve Watson

Some Comments on Prescriptive Multiculturalism

It has no foundational texts

We were discussing the origins of the multiculturalist ideology and the idea that ‘Diversity is Our Strength.’ (I shall call this the MCD Complex – MCDC.) I pointed out that although Liberalism could point back to JS Mill and any number of other philosophers, and Socialists could point to Marx and Rousseau, and Feminists could look to de Beauvoir, and Anarchists had their Proudhons and Kropotkins, and even Conservatives – the least ideological of all ideologues – could refer to Burke or Halifax, and so on for the other political ideologies, there was no one of comparable calibre making the case for the MCDC; so where did these ideologies come from and how were they able so quickly to come to dominate the intellectual world of the élites?

It has no models

Moreover, if multiculturalism is championing something different from a multiracial or multiethnic society, it must mean that a single polity ought to contain arbitrarily many cultures. Now, this is a not a fact about the individuals in that society – for no single person is multicultural – but about subgroups. We are supposed, then, to welcome the existence of many distinct groups with comparable political power in a single polity, where each of those groups is distinguished by its own ways of life, interests, values, attitudes, etc. But that is an obvious recipe for intercommunal conflict. Such things may exist stably in authoritarian regimes like the Roman Empire or the Ottoman (where the millet system formalised the arrangement) or in Yugoslavia or other suchlike places, but there are precisely no successful liberal democratic examples, so how has it suddenly become the official doctrine of all the Western democracies?

It is oddly targeted

And note that it is only the Western democracies that are supposed to adopt the MCDC as policy / moral imperative / governing ideology. No one demands that Russia or China or Ethiopia or Iran or Fiji or Indonesia adopt the MCDC, or that they subject themselves to vast (barely regulated) inflows of immigrants in pursuit of the end of global diversification. This, at least, has been pretty widely recognised, but the reason for this tightly restricted application of what would seem to be universally applicable ideology remains elusive. And when it is addressed by defenders of the MCDC it is far too often in terms of a just punishment for previous sins of those societies (again, note, sins that are only counted as punishable for the West,) which gives ammunition to those who would treat it as an act of deliberate aggression against the West.